Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Facebook, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, held another of his popular Instagram AMAs and spoke about the pending App Lab submission from Virtual Desktop. He also went into detail about the current store restrictions for apps like them.Virtual Desktop is available on the Oculus Store, but a major feature is missing from the official release. If a patch is sideloaded through the SideQuest app store, users with a good wi-fi connection and a beefy PC can stream PC VR games through the app and play them on the Quest.They have submitted this version to the Oculus App Lab and if it is approved users will not have to sideload any content to experience the full feature set of Virtual Desktop. The application is currently in limbo and in the recent AMA, Bosworth went into some detail about why it may be held up.Bosworth:“Yeah, as you probably heard from Guy on Twitter, they’ve submitted the app for review. I actually don’t know the status of it yet but that’s still kind of ongoing, so I don’t know that. But I do want to take this opportunity to address the broader thinking behind the store and App Lab and restrictions there.
Virtual reality is new, and we want to take it mainstream. What we found is that people would try virtual reality once and if they had a bad experience, they would not be so easy to get back and try it again. So, it was very important to us that when people tried virtual reality in Quest, they had a great experience.Travel companies are using virtual reality to allow customers to visit places and determine if they wish to visit in real life.
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Developers are our life blood so, obviously having had a success, we feel like we’re in a good position with consumers [and] breaking mainstream, we’re now trying to release those constraints that we put in place, and the App Lab is just the first step in that path.To bring this full circle, one of the challenges with Virtual Desktop is that we can’t know what your wi-fi connection is like or how it changes, and so we couldn’t guarantee a good experience, and that was why we had limitations on apps like this shipping in the store.”